“The offer would come one month after New York media and real estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman said he was considering selling the newspaper and had hired Lazard Ltd (LAZ.N) to assist with the process. It underscores the declining readership and plunging advertising revenue that have plagued the tabloid for years.”

“Witness the competition for the next proposed Guggenheim museum, in Helsinki. It attracted 1,715 entries online, arguably the largest number ever in an architectural competition. The winners flooded social media and were picked over on design blogs within hours. If one is built, it will likely employ complex geometries rendered with the help of robots.”

“People want to know if humans are getting taller, smarter, better looking or more athletic. My answer is truthful but disappointing: We’re almost certainly evolving, but we don’t know in what direction or how fast.”

“What explains the continued popularity of Jane Austen and the handful of novels she wrote? It is, after all, rather remarkable that a woman who spent her life in quiet provincial circumstances in early 19th-century England should become, posthumously, a literary celebrity outshining every author since then, bar none.”

“The rags-to-riches story of a woman who captures a prince’s heart while losing her shoe is also the studio’s second highest-grossing live-action release in China, having made $65.1 million in the People’s Republic. Globally, its total stands at a regal $336.2 million.”

“It obviously isn’t a crime to give a picture to a museum, and they treated me like royalty. One thing led to another, and I kept doing it for 30 years,” says Mark Landis, one of the most prolific art forgers in US history.

“The current architectural zeitgeist, whereby form invariably follows finance, finds its purest expression in the skyscrapers de nos jours, with their parametrically designed waveforms that positively billow with opportunism.”

“One thing I try to argue is that it’s not just about bigger machines to crunch more data, and it’s not even about pattern recognition. It’s about frameworks of recognition; how you choose to look, rather than what you’re trying to see.”

“The median advance for traditionally published authors is “well under £6,600”, according to early findings of a survey into authors’ attitudes towards their publisher. The survey also found that bigger publishers pay more.”

“America’s last bipartisan cause is this: A liberal education is irrelevant, and technical training is the new path forward. It is the only way, we are told, to ensure that Americans survive in an age defined by technology and shaped by global competition. The stakes could not be higher. This dismissal of broad-based learning, however, comes from a fundamental misreading of the facts.”

Graham Parker: “What has frustrated me more in all the articles I have read since Alan Gilbert announced his conclusion as music director, was the complete lack of considering the audience in the short listing of candidates. The audience, in this case, are: current patrons of the New York Philharmonic; future audiences who like classical music but don’t buy tickets; folks who don’t yet like classical music but have a latent reason to like it at some point; and then the wider audience of New York and all that it stands for as a leading cultural capital of the world.”

“Romanian prosecutors investigating an alleged bribery scheme have questioned the former finance minister about the origins of 100 paintings,” including three Picasso sketches, several works by Andy Warhol, and an apparent Renoir that was found in a safe along with gold bricks.

Greg Allen: “Christian Viveros-Fauné’s artnet News column earlier this week, which purported to pull back the curtain on Klaus Biesenbach’s reign of curatorial terror at MoMA, is not going to help; it is not only poisonous and pointlessly personal, it’s inaccurate.”

“‘Some of you may have read the diatribes against one of my favorite colleagues Klaus Biesenbach raging today,” he said … “[It] reminds me of the diatribes that went on against me when I was at MOCA. … So with Klaus, it’s Bjork; with me, it was James Franco, unfortunately.’ This generated much laughter from the audience.” (Deitch also says he wish he’d presented the Björk show.)

Professor Stephen Greenblatt on his lecture at the first Iranian Shakespeare Congress: “Most of the questions were from students, the majority of them women, whose boldness, critical intelligence, and articulateness startled me. Very few of the faculty and students had traveled outside of Iran, but the questions were, for the most part, in flawless English and extremely well informed.”

Thirty-something artist Cao Fei: “Criticizing society, that’s the aesthetics of the last generation. When I started making art, I didn’t want to do political things. I was more interested in subcultures, in pop culture.”

While his career in both theater and movies included such hits as Mame, Same Time Next Year and I Love My Wife, Saks was best known for a long series of collaborations (stage and screen) with Neil Simon, from Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple through to the “Brighton Beach Trilogy.”

Following the successful struggle to keep Brandeis University from closing the Rose and selling off its collection, Rush went on to become founding director of the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.

“Justin Peck, Liam Scarlett, Wayne McGregor, Christopher Wheeldon: They’re among the hottest young choreographers in ballet today. And Pennsylvania Ballet will dance their works and more next year in a blockbuster-packed season, artistic director Angel Corella announced Monday. This is the sort of world-class programming that dance fans anticipated when Corella was hired in the fall.”

“On Dec. 3, a live version of The Wiz will make its debut on the network, produced in partnership with Cirque du Soleil’s theatrical division, which will then take it to Broadway for the 2016-17 season.”

How do they do it? Don’t opera houses lose money on every performance? Not necessarily. And La Fenice is taking advantage of something Venice has more of than almost any other Italian city. (No, not water.)

Four years ago, when he was still prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan described a peace monument by sculptor Mehmet Aksoy near the Turkish-Armenian border as a “monstrosity.” Under libel laws that Erdoğan has been quick to use himself against critics, he was ordered to pay Aksoy 10,000 lire (about $3,800). The president is appealing.

“In the early 1980s, the age of the personal computer had arrived and ‘computerphobia’ was suddenly everywhere. … [The subject] came up in magazines, newspapers, computer training manuals, psychology studies, and advertising copy.”

“Throughout the Latin Middle Ages we find references to many apparent anachronisms, many confounding examples of mechanical art. Musical fountains. Robotic servants. Mechanical beasts and artificial songbirds. Most were designed and built beyond the boundaries of Latin Christendom, in the cosmopolitan courts of Baghdad, Damascus, Constantinople and Karakorum. Such automata came to medieval Europe as gifts from foreign rulers, or were reported in texts by travellers to these faraway places.”

“Considering how much uproar the piece ignited, the apology is pretty weak, with co-editor in chief Mike Fleming Jr. seeming to place a lot of blame on the headline, which ‘created a context from which no article could recover.'”

“The appointment of [Trever] Noah, a newcomer to American television, promises to add youthful vitality and international perspective to ‘The Daily Show.’ It puts a nonwhite performer at the head of this flagship Comedy Central franchise, and one who comes with Mr. Stewart’s endorsement.”

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more ... read more

“Men are wicked, and when I die I shall at least have the consolation of knowing that I have never rendered anyone a service.” Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford (quoted in the Goncourt brothers’ ... read more

In Monday’s posting revisiting an early <em>Rifftides</em> piece about Tom Talbert (pictured ca. 1956), the staff was remiss in not including examples of Talbert’s music. Let’s remedy that. From his remarkable Bix ... read more

The thrill is gone. For several of the highest-estimated properties in the recent series of Impressionist, modern and contemporary sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the “auction fever” of yesteryear has given way to single-bid transfers ... read more

The latest episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading. In this ... read more

A scene from Larry Peerce’s 1969 film version of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw. The screenplay is by Arnold Schulman: (This is the latest in a series of arts- ... read more

Demands on time and resources have sidetracked plans for a new Monday Recommendation. Hey, stuff happens. The Rifftides staff’s solution is to reach back to the earliest days of this blog, and ... read more

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II appear as the mystery guests on What’s My Line? The host is John Daly and the panelists are Arlene Francis, Fred Allen, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Bennett Cerf. This episode ... read more

Denny Zeitlin, Wishing On The Moon, Live At Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola In New York City Pianist Zeitlin has recorded three albums with bassist Buster Williams and drummer Matt Wilson, beginning in ... read more

Cover and back page of four-page folio being published in a limited edition by Cold Turkey Press.John Bryan published so many underground papers and magazines over three decades — beginning in 1962 with renaissance, a ... read more

I don’t want to say anything bad about the royal wedding, which was lovely and inspiring. Or about Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the cellist who played so gorgeously. But one of the pieces he played was crazily ... read more

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review a Connecticut revival of The Will Rogers Follies. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Will Rogers is mostly forgotten now, but he used to be famous ... read more

William Talman, who played Hamilton Burger on Perry Mason, appears in a 1968 anti-smoking TV public-service announcement, the first one to feature a celebrity. A longtime smoker, Talman died of lung cancer six weeks after ... read more